Sparta

Sparta was a city-state in Laconia, in the south-eastern Peloponnese, and became the dominant land power of ancient Greece. In myth it was also called Lacedaemon, and its kings Tyndareus and Menelaus ruled the country from which Helen was taken to Troy. Its later royal houses claimed descent from Heracles.

Lacedaemon and Sparta

The region was called Lacedaemon after a mythical king of that name. Pausanias (3.1.1–2) gives the Spartan tradition: Lelex was the first ruler, his son Myles followed, and after him came Eurotas, who drained the standing water on the plain into the sea by a channel and gave his name to the river. Eurotas’ successor was Lacedaemon, said to be the son of Zeus and Taygete, a mountain nymph. Lacedaemon married Sparta, the daughter of Eurotas, named the land and its people after himself and then founded a city that he named after his wife. Apollodorus (3.10.3) also gives Taygete as the mother of Lacedaemon by Zeus.

According to Apollodorus, Lacedaemon and Sparta had a son, Amyclas, and a daughter, Eurydice, who married Acrisius of Argos and became the mother of Danae; this Eurydice is not the wife of Orpheus. Pausanias says that the Spartans counted only two Charites (Graces), Cleta and Phaenna, and that it was Lacedaemon who first established their worship (9.35.1); their sanctuary stood by the stream Tiasa on the road to Amyclae, and the Spartans believed that Lacedaemon had founded it and given the Graces their names (3.18.6).

Amyclas, Hyacinthus and Tyndareus

Amyclas built the town of Amyclae, and Pausanias (3.1.3) remembers him as the father of the beautiful Hyacinthus, whose tomb was at Amyclae. After Amyclas came his eldest son Argalus, then Cynortas, and then Cynortas’ son Oebalus, who married Gorgophone, a daughter of Perseus, and became the father of Tyndareus (3.1.4). A quarrel over the throne with Hippocoon sent Tyndareus into exile, but Heracles later brought him back.

Tyndareus, Helen and Menelaus

Tyndareus married Leda. In Apollodorus (3.10.7), Zeus, in the form of a swan, was the father of Pollux and Helen by Leda, while Tyndareus was the father of Castor and Clytemnestra. When Helen was ready to marry, many kings of Greece came to woo her. Tyndareus made the suitors swear to defend the man she chose, and she chose Menelaus (3.10.9). Odysseus received Penelope instead. This is why, when Paris carried Helen off, the Greeks went to war at Troy, and why Sparta is the home of Menelaus in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Dioscuri

Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, were the brothers of Helen and the great heroes of Sparta. In the Odyssey (11.298–304) Odysseus sees their mother Leda in the underworld and is told that the two, though held by the earth, are alive on alternate days and honoured like gods. Apollodorus (3.11.2) explains how: Castor, who was mortal, was killed in the quarrel with Idas and Lynceus, and Pollux refused the immortality Zeus offered him unless he could share it with his brother, so the two pass one day among the gods and the next in the underworld. Pausanias records several sanctuaries of the Dioscuri in and around Sparta (3.14.6; 3.20.2).

The Heraclids and the Two Royal Houses

The Spartan kings were Heraclids, descendants of Heracles. After Heracles became a god, his children were driven from the Peloponnese by Eurystheus, and sheltered at Athens (Apollodorus 2.8.1). They tried to return, but the first attempt failed, because Hyllus misunderstood an oracle that spoke of a “third crop”; the descendants understood it as three generations. When the descendants of Cleodaeus had grown up, they asked the oracle again and were told that the “narrows” meant the sea crossing. Temenus gathered an army in Locris, where Naupactus was founded. When they came back under his command, Aristodemus died by a thunderbolt and left twin sons, Eurysthenes and Procles (2.8.2–3).

In the division of the Peloponnese by lot, Lacedaemon fell to the twins (Apollodorus 2.8.4), which is why Sparta always had two kings at once. Pausanias names Eurysthenes as the elder, whose descendants were the Agiad house (3.2.1), while the line of Procles became the Eurypontids (3.7.1). Herodotus (6.52) notes that the Spartans told it differently, saying that Aristodemus himself, and not his sons, led them into the land, while the poets named the twins.

From Heraclid Kings to Historical Sparta

Pausanias continues the line of kings into history. Under the Agiad house, he says (3.2.1–3), the Lacedaemonians took part in colonising Achaea and Aeolis, drove the Cynurians out of part of their land, and began their wars with Argos over disputed territory. He places the lawgiver Lycurgus in the reign of King Agesilaus (3.2.4); Herodotus (1.65) tells how the Pythia at Delphi greeted Lycurgus unsure whether to call him a god or a man, and says that the Spartans believed he brought their laws from Crete, though some held that the oracle itself gave them to him. Pausanias then tells how later kings conquered the neighbouring towns of Amyclae and Pharis, and how King Teleclus was killed at a sanctuary on the border between Laconia and Messenia (3.2.4–6). The old tradition that the first rulers were Lelex, Eurotas and Lacedaemon was thus the beginning of a continuous list that led from the age of myth to the city-state that the Greeks knew.

Myth in the Spartan Landscape

Pausanias, who visited the city, records many places where the myths were kept alive. At Therapne, east of the Eurotas, a sanctuary was dedicated to Menelaus, and he and Helen were said to be buried there (3.19.9). At the Limnaeum stood the temple of Artemis Orthia, whose wooden image was said to have been brought from the land of the Taurians by Orestes and Iphigenia (3.16.7–11). At Amyclae a great throne carried reliefs of Heracles, the Dioscuri and other mythical scenes (3.18–19).

Leonidas at Thermopylae

Herodotus (7.204) traces the ancestry of Leonidas back through a long line of Spartan kings to Heracles himself, and adds that he had come to the kingship unexpectedly. When the Persian army invaded Greece in 480 BC, Leonidas held the pass at Thermopylae with three hundred Spartans. Herodotus (7.224–225) says that Leonidas fell fighting bravely, that there was a great struggle between Persians and Lacedaemonians over his body until the Greeks dragged it away, routing the enemy four times, and that he himself had learned by inquiry the names of all three hundred. Pausanias (3.14.1) saw at Sparta, opposite the theatre, the tomb of Leonidas and a slab inscribed with the names and fathers’ names of the men who fought at Thermopylae. The Spartans were the soldiers of a city that traced its kings to a god’s son, and the story of Thermopylae is where that claim of descent meets history.

See Also: Zeus, The Graces, Tyndareus, Helen, Menelaus, Dioscuri, Heracles, Children of Heracles